Let's consider a moderately sensitive chunk of personal data - my basic financial transaction records. Obviously, my banks and credit card companies have their respective sets of transactions. Then, I consolidate those transactions into Quicken on my Windows PC. I'm able to do that because Intuit and the financial institutions have agreed on a data format (called QFX for now) which both the banking systems and Quicken understand. At this point, I can use my data for whatever purposes Quicken allows, plus a few others. Reconcile bank statements, print reports, etc. Of course my banks each offer a limited set of online services, but none of these are very good. Because each bank, credit card company, and investment firm use a *different* system, I get *different* uses for my data at each company's website. Both the online systems of the financial companies and Quicken offer limited data export capabilities that in theory allow me to pull my data out of those systems and into my own. What can I pull my data into? Well, there's Excel, and, well, Excel. Not a great choice. I think we have to do a lot better. We'll discuss this situation in more detail later on.
Let's consider a relatively trivial chunk of personal data - my golf scores and detailed statistics. I keep score, and enter details like whether I hit the fairway and how many putts I took, into a really nice app on my iPhone. This little app lets me look at a few charts that it decides are the right ones, and it lets me upload my golf data to an online system that I can use via a website. What if I want to create charts they didn't think of? What if I don't like their service in the future and want to change to something else? Will I have to leave my hard-won accumulation of golf stats behind? Today I would. I think we should be able to do a lot better. Although this example may be trivial to most who are not golfers (and critically to those who are!), it is an example of a *pattern* that affects most people for some set of their data that is meaningful to them.
Finally, let's consider an extremely serious chunk of personal data - my medical records. To be fair, for the most part my medical records don't exist in any useful form anywhere. In some medical systems, some doctor's offices, some hospitals, and so on, there are electronic systems keeping track of who I saw, for what symptoms, with which diagnoses, treatments, and billing details. In many, there's nothing more than that room with the filing cabinets and those manila folders with the color-coded tabs. However, I can't get access to that information from any single provider of services to me, much less in aggregate across all of the providers I've seen through the years. When I consider how important medical information is to most people, and how powerless we are to see it, correct it, or even know about it, it's downright frightening.
Ask yourself if you could get any of this data? If so, please let me know how to do it. If not, do you care? What other kinds of data matter to you? Is that data more or less available than what I've described?
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